Before US President Barack Obama announced last week that Washington and Havana would restore diplomatic ties, one US official had already been working on a special project - call it insemination diplomacy - to unite the two countries.

Officials have confirmed that a US senator helped a Cuban agent imprisoned in California to impregnate his wife. They wanted to have a child but were separated by prison walls and the sea.

The highly improbable arrangements allowed for Adriana Perez Hernandez to be artificially inseminated months ago. But then, last week, her husband, Gerardo Hernandez, returned to Cuba to a hero's welcome.

While the island celebrated the thawing of relations with the United States, the pregnancy quickly became the talk of Cuba.

On state television, Hernandez, who was freed along with two other Cuban agents, spoke delicately of how his wife's pregnancy was achieved "by remote control" earlier this year.

The parents-to-be owe much of their good fortune to Senator Patrick Leahy, who has made several trips to Cuba over the years.

Leahy visited Havana in February 2013 with his wife, Marcelle, a registered nurse, in order to secure better conditions for Alan Gross, a jailed US citizen who was released last week in the normalization push.

Leahy said in a statement that he and his wife met last year with the prospective mother, who "made a personal appeal to Marcelle".

"She was afraid that she would never have the chance to have a child," said Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Senate's State Department and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee. He opposes the US embargo on Cuba.

"As parents and grandparents we both wanted to try to help her," he said.

That meeting set in motion a series of requests and actions, including overcoming some medical logistics problems, that ultimately led to the pregnancy.

The US Justice Department confirmed to AFP that Washington "facilitated Mrs. Hernandez's request to have a baby with her husband".

US officials said all costs were covered by the Cuban government.

Hernandez was arrested in the United States in 1998 and convicted in 2001 on charges of espionage and conspiracy to murder. He and four other Cubans were sentenced to two life sentences plus 15 years.

Hernandez was released on Wednesday last week, alongside two other Cubans jailed on the same charges. Two of the five had already been released, one in 2013 and one earlier this year.

Hernandez arrived in Cuba to be greeted by his wife, who surprised onlookers with her pregnant belly, which became a symbol of optimism about the revived ties between the US and Cuba after five decades of hostility.

The baby, a girl to be named Gema, is due at the end of December.

(China Daily 12/25/2014 page10)